No, it's not an urban legend. The crowd at the latest GOP presidential candidates debate cheered wildly (twice) as Rick Perry addressed a question on how, having condemned 234 death-row inmates to execution, he has done so more than any modern-era governor (including even Dubya when he occupied Perry's office). See for yourself, Republicans applauding the cold-blooded murder by Americans mostly of fellow Americans in the one OECD nation that clings to this barbaric practice:
President Obama is in Puerto Rico today harvesting Hispanic votes - not there, of course, since you can't vote for presidents in PR - but among millions of Hispanics in swing states. Economic conditions being as wretched as they are in Puerto Rico, when the territory seeks and achieves statehood - as many there now wish - to prevent having to redesign Old Glory's number of stars:
1. "Dakota" will replace North and South Dakota. No one will notice.
2. Montana will be ceded to topographical and ideological kindred spirit Alberta.
3. Oklahoma will be sold to the Southern Baptist Convention, so that U.S. Baptists, like Mormons, have a jurisdiction to call their own, though OK will have to shed its statehood statehood status.
4. Alaska will be sold to the highest bidder, likely BP. The Interior Department, in negotiating the deal, will argue that Palin, now mostly resident in the Lower 48, should not be cause for a discount in the price.
Fabulists
Prof. Brad DeLong, after establishing what a Ponzi scheme exactly is and is not, hosts Perry-filleting party. (Brad DeLong)
Dubya credits himself with bin Laden capture. (Ben Armbruster, TruthProgress) Related: Dorothy credits Wicked Witch of the East for "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," a surprise to Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg. TruthProgress reminds us how Bush famously let bin Laden flee in late 2001, was later lackadaisial in seeking his capture, and on one ill-advised occasion allowed he didn't care about capturing bin Laden. (Which, true, if like me you believe that he like having bin Laden at loose to justify his permanent-wartime presidency.)
Along the same lines, Cheney,'s memoir, a "love letter to himself," confirms the man still lives in an alternate reality. (Paul Begala, Daily Beast) Begula says the Dick should be grateful to Aaron Burr, otherwise Cheney would be regarded by historians not only as the worst but most dangerous veep in history. (I love reviewers who don't hold back.)
The jobs speech
Krugman approves. I'll repeat that, Krugman approves. (Must have gotten up on the right side of bed.) (NYT)
So, mostly, does Robert Reich. (RobertReich.com)
So does MacroAdvisors, which goes into irrefutable but understandable detail. (MacroAdvsors.com)
Obama in better shape for 2012 than you think. (Andrew Hacker, New York Review of Books)
Voters still side with Dem agenda. (Steven Benen, Washington Monthly)
Booming Hispanic population could decide close races in 2012. (Amy Bingham, ABC) Yes, outside of diehard Miami anti-Castro sect, Hispancs still mostly vote Dem.
Obama, sporting purple tie, addresses Congress last Thursday. (Toronto Star)
Dems, starting with Obama, sporting mix-party purple neckwear. (Dana Flavelle, Toronto Star)
What the left doesn't get about Obama. (Jonathan Chait, NYT) Mostly that his admittedly disheartening compromises have nonetheless advanced the progessive cause, and he would have done more without persistent GOP obstructionism. I'd add that Mr. O. has mostly been out there on his own since taking the oath, absent the crowds of supporters for each progressive initiative he warned would meet fierce opposition and require lots of help. Well, the help went on a siesta, and the Tea Partiers took over, and whose fault is that? Maybe I'll post on what the left doesn't get about itself, chiefly that it's lazy, backbiting (Al Gore and Matt Taibbi currently are beating up on Obama, the latest to do so among disaffected libs) and preferring an empty "moral victory" to half a loaf. (Much less than the 1/16th of a loaf Ted Kennedy was famously said to settle for, knowing he'd have another crack at it now that at least part of what he sought was established in law.)
Ailing eurozone
Few options left to save a eurozone hanging by a thread. (Edward Harrison, Naked Capitalism)
Elsewhere
China's one-child policy causing labor shortages, hence higher-priced exports, hence bid to rapidly move up "value chain" which so far, not so rapid. (Kevin Hamlin, Bloomberg BusinessWeek)
(AP)
"President Obama, this is your army. We are ready to march. Let's take these sons of bitches out and give America back to an America where we belong." -James P. Hoffa, Teamsters president, in a Labor Day speech in Detroit, Sept. 5. Hoffa's SOB reference was to Tea Partiers in Congress.
Former Liberal PM Jean Chretien greets well-wishers after attending state funeral of Jack Layton in Toronto. (CP)
Chretien predicts NDP-Liberal merger coming sooner than later. (Bill Curry, Globe and Mail)
Peggy Nash, NDP's high-profile finance critic and trilingual MP for Toronto's Parkdale-High Park, is among women considering a leadership bid. (CP)
Five women who could be next NDP leader. (Tim Harper, Toronto Star)
Olivia Chow on Jack's last days. (Linda Diebel, Toronto Star) (video)
Obama to propose $300-billion program in his speech on job creation tomorrow. (Major Garrett, Atlantic) Obama's last chance to pull the nation together?
Engraved on the FDR memorial in the Mall, from his sixth fireside chat, in 1934: "No country, however rich, can afford the waste of its human resources. Demoralization caused by vast unemployment is our greatest extravagance. Morally, it is the greatest menace to our social order."
First principles: Channeling FDR's moral case against unemployment. (Justin Wolfers, Freakonomics)
Human rights chief says Europe is complicit in U.S. torture. (CBS News)
Conrad Black scorns Harper's prison-expansion policy. (Tondra MacCharles, Toronto Star)
Annals of commerce
Taxes, regulations are not killing small business, owners say. (Kevin G. Hall, McClatchey)
Charles and David Koch. (AP)
Koch finds parallel between Obama and Saddam Hussein in conclave with fellow political-action donors. (Mother Jones) (audio)
USPS, facing default, may have to shut down this winter without emergency bailout from Congress. (Steve Greenhouse, NYT) Drastic options include eliminating Saturday service, closing 3,700 post offices, and laying off 120,000 employees, or one-fifth of total workforce.
Banks accused of taking $6 billion in reinsurance kickbacks, investigators say. (Jeff Horwitz, American Banker)
Setbacks for women: Sally Krawcheck is out at Bank of America; Carol Bartz fired as CEO of Yahoo; Elizabeth Warren, passed over to run consumer-finance protection agency, unlikely to contest rookie U.S. Senator Scott Brown in Massachusetts, given his 50%-plus approval rating.
Women should use their "erotic capital" in business world, says British sociology prof. (Francine Kopun, Toronto Star)
A&E
Actor-writer-director Sarah Polley, 32, excited about her new movie, Take This Waltz, premiering at TIFF this Saturday, and her first pregnancy, with new husband, David Sandomierski, a Ph.D. candidate in law.
Sarah Polley's latest production is a pregnancy. (Linda Barnard, Toronto Star)
The new assembly-line art. (Edward Tenner, Atlantic) The Impressionists did it. Contemporary artists also increasingly are turning to students to execute the works they conceive, leaving the craft of art to others.
Five reasons Eddie Murphy will make a great Oscars host. (Joshua Kurp, SplitSider)
Vital signs
In campaign against rampant Russian alcoholism, Dmitry Medvedev urges wine drinking in place vodka. (Andrew Osborn, Daily Telegraph)
How to get doctors to wash their hands. (Cord Jefferson, Good)
Taiwan considers tax breaks and cash for having babies. (Ralph Jennings, Christian Science Monitor)
Gallery
Fantastic typing machines. (Elizabeth Weingarten, Slate) (photo gallery) The ancient brutes look like sewing machines, phonographs, even torture devices. Actually, the manual I learned on, in 1971, was a torture device - I still have the blisters. (Getty Images)
OMG
Chrissie Hynde is...60. (Alex Balk, Awl)
Just as I don't need a special day to celebrate Mom, I don't need a 10th anniversary to seek meaning in 9/11 and its aftermath. The more we "normalize" that event - put it in the context of the equally avoidable Hurricane Betsy's devastation of New Orleans in the LBJ era, to pick an example - the more able we are to study it in the detached way that's required.
(AP)
After all, it was a panicked response to 9/11 that conflated that terrorist attack into the nation-defining episode Osama bin Laden intended, unleashing the dogs of war on innocent people, stripping Americans of basic civil rights, degrading America's military prowess and its public finances, and exposing the U.S. to the world as maladroit, mendacious and belligerent in diplomacy; incompetent at military occupation; inept in the gathering and interpretation of intelligence; and having only a lip-service commitment to the eradication of torture from the world. (I assumed, cynically, that the U.S. would at least bring its own WMDs to plant if it couldn't find any of Saddam's, in the manner of a trigger-happy LAPD equpped with "drop guns" for use when accidentally making widows in South Central LA.)
Journos are exploiting the grim anniversary, or being made to by editors. A glossy 10th anniversary commemorative book from Time-Life went on sale at my 7-Eleven last week. The $19.95 proceeds don't go to a firefighters' spouses fund, but to shareholders and bonus-collecting executives of Time Warner Inc. NPR is similarly devoting the entire week to a misery bath, imparting again things I already know.
The 10th-annivesary print chronicles I've pored through so far are recitations of what was plainly obvious to me and I'm certain many others in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.
In an overwrought New York essay, Frank Rich marvels that the further West he travelled that painful fall, the less interest in 9/11 he witnessed. As a Torontonian who spent part of his honeymoon taking in the view from the observation deck of the WTC, I was far more traumatized than the Americans with whom I spoke on business in the days immediately following 9/11 who lived west of the Mississippi. That did not strike me as odd then, nor does it now. How long did the Oklahoma City tragedy hold the collective attention of Americans? Or Columbine? Or Tucson? (Earlier this year, for those who've understandably forgotten if they're among the four million Americans at risk of losing their homes to foreclosure.)
9/11 was conveniently repackaged as a means of turning Bush into a permanent wartime president, I'm now told, a gambit that was screamingly obvious as early as 2002 when Bush, in the second year of his presidency, used a trumped-up "war on terror" to make GOP gains in Congress. By that means, Rove and Bush broke the tradition in which the party that wins the WH traditionally loses seats in the next off-year election. Thanks for the news flash, nine years after the fact.
George Packer's 9/11 essay in The New Yorker sinks to greater depths of assumed ignorance on the part of contemporary observers. Packer, who doesn't bother explaining why he full-throatedly championed the invasion of a sovereign Iraq on spurious grounds (he has since, awkwardly, recanted), has lately discovered that the past decade polarized America. You don't say. Actually, America was becoming politically polarized since Newt Gingrich and the later stolen presidential election of 2000. The exploitation of 9/11 by Rummy, Cheney and Rove began, and was seen even then to begin, in late 2001. But Packer only now finds that America is now "coming apart." For proof, just look at the vilification of Obama and the diefication of Bachmann.
Packer has done his homework. The 20-year decline of the American middle class - the widening gap between rich and poor, and growing sense of futility among the working class - was underway before 9/11, he notes. Thanks for the tip. A dozen progressive think tanks could have informed you of that gathering storm and the bitterness toward, and distrust of, elites in which it would eventually manifest itself, and not just among Tea Partiers.
Like Rich, Packer is astonished that the nation was not united, and sustainably, in shared sacrifice to fight the new "evildoers." Instead, in December 2001, Bush told Americans to not change their way of life and in particular to keep shopping - "or the terrorists win." Iraq was to be the first major U.S. war to be fought with tax cuts that debauched the Treasury, rather than tax increases to properly finance it. Those tax cuts, in 2001 and 2003 and each skewed to the rich, were much-discussed at the time as an act of fiscal lunancy. Majority popular approval of the Iraq invasion was evident in only two countries, the U.S. and Israel. Would Americans have supported the war had their taxes been raised to pay for it? Before it commenced, governments representing 96% of the world population opposed the looming misadventure. All these facts were known - along with warnings from the State Department of the chaos to be unleashed in Baghdad, which Bush chose to ignore - and got a thorough airing in the lead-up to the Iraqi conflict in the first three months of 2003. The facts haven't changed. Why are some observers outraged - or in Packer's case, dumbfounded - now who weren't then?
The answer is that it wasn't merely the Bush administration that was delusional. So was majority opinion, lusting for revenge. One heard then, conspicuously from David Frum, then a WH speechwriter - that Bush had to attack someone post 9/11 or he would have been ridden out of town on a rail. I believe that was Frum's exact expression. In these enlightened times, that mentality no longer prevails even in elementary-school playgrounds. It did then, at the highest reaches of American power, and no facts to surface since have changed the realities of 2003 for those who calmly assessed them when it most mattered, before the war started. How could the U.S. not, to at least some degree, be "coming apart" after wars in Iraq and Afghanistan championed by armchair liberal pundits but fought by weekend reservists who signed up for local flood and hurricane relief work and found themselves, on a third and fourth tour of duty, dying alongside their buddies?
That America's foreign policy elite and liberal chattering classes that backed the Iraq war - including Canadians like Michael Ignatieff and Margaret MacMillan - were accelerating America's decline, at a time when the U.S. should have been dealing with problems at home, was evident in 2002 as Condoleeza Rice coordinated the PR campaign of speeches by Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld to sell the war. The world was primed for an illogical American response to 9/11. After all, the Americans had just for the first time installed in their presidency the loser of a presidential contest. Those folks can't run an election, and now they're telling us they have evidence sufficiently compelling to cause upheaval thoughout the Middle East? And their frat-boy reaction to sound advice from traditional allies is to start serving "freedom fries" in the Congressional canteen?
Current events may not bear me out, but I swear if you were paying any kind of attention in 2001-03 you will not learn anything from the outpouring of manufactured grief to plague us over the next week or so. Worse, every word and image you see will displace one that should be devoted to crisis-solving over a shrinking middle class, the backbone of America's supremacy; to the continued deprivation among the working class; to a growing population of poor (36 million Americans live below the poverty line); to a comparatively ignorant American adult workforce (global ranking in math: 35th); to a country that is foreclosing on a prosperous future by laying off teachers and closing schools today.
In an ideal world, robust debate about those issues would be the means of commemorating 9/11. Have we not already shed buckets of tears over a freak event, when every ounce of American ingenuity, persistence and resolve should now be dedicated to the crises at hand?
But no, we're to have another distracting weepfest. Gary Younge in the Guardian can't be the only one asking, "Can the U.S. move beyond the narcissism of 9/11?"
As the Iraq war floundered unity gave way to the acrimony, mistrust and mutual recrimination that characterises US politics today. The response to 9/11 did not create these divisions – a year before the attacks the presidential election was decided by the courts – but it deepened, broadened, sustained and framed them for more than half a decade before the economic collapse. It was the central issue in the 2004 election and cast the 2008 election in terms of hope – Obama – against fear, McCain and Palin. Internationally Obama's victory marked the country's belated, more nuanced, more enlightened response to 9/11, signalling America's readiness to meaningfully re-engage with the rest of the world and the treaties that govern it.
I've shed my tears over 9/11. Two dozen Canadians died that day; and our only neighbor and best friend was savagely attacked for maximum traumatizing effect. But by a band of thugs, with a $500,000 budget. The Germans dealt with their Baader-Meinhoff atrocities, the Italians with Red Brigade assassinations, and the Brits with a long-running IRA war that nearly claimed Thatcher's entire cabinet in a botched mass-assassination attempt on her cabinet in Brighton. Those nations and peoples all have long since moved on.
And well they have, since economic crisis now grips Europe no less than America.
What can we learn from 9/11 a mere decade out? Very little we don't already know. Two hundred years out, perhaps quite a bit. Only now, for instance, looking back at the French Revolution, can one see simply by looking at a timeline of French history that the republic has been in decline ever since. Civil wars marked life in France after the Napoleonic defeats, followed by French military humiliation in the Franco-Prussian War* of 1871 and the two world wars of the 20th century, the punishing retreat from Indo-China (as it was then called), the interminable conflict in Algeria, and now the almost studied ineptitude in integrating immigrants of color - not that the French elites are making a genuine effort. (Neither, to be fair, are the Norwegians.)
On a cheerier note, I expect that Main Street America has largely put the horrors of 9/11 behind it, having the more recent ones of Joplin, Mo. to rightly preoccupy it. Had 9/11 occurred in Miami or Seattle, rather than the English-speaking world's media capital, I expect we'd be having a brief, dignified memorial at this time.
I do have the sense that 9/11, unmasking an intellectual bankruptcy in the foreign-policy and media elite, necessitates for them a ceaseless agonizing over their unbearable lightness of sagacity. For these folks not only failed to anticipate Sept. 11, 2001 or react to it with calm, sound contemplation of a new enemy in new times, they turned an incident properly addressed with construction crews and sustained detective work into eight lost years of chasing shadows. And they did so at fantastic expense at the very time America most needed to get a start on confronting systemic dysfunctions in private-sector governance, income inequality, urban decay, the integration of 12 million undocumented immigrants, and the replacement of Civil War-era schoolhouses - in short, the harnessing of America's strengths to set right its shortcomings, all of them fixable.
That's what I now weep over.
Related
On Remaining Sane In The Face of Terrorism. (James Fallows, Atlantic)
It is precisely because people and societies can panic about terrorist threats -- and often did ten years ago -- that both the threats and the panic are worth doing everything possible to minimize. Anyone who has ever thought about the long-term effort against terrorism realizes that the threat of attacks will never completely go away. If a society is large, open, and diverse, that is simply impossible. It's like 'eliminating' crime, or evil. Or like eliminating the chance of another Columbine-style schoolyard shooting, which is 'terrorism' in every way except the conventional name. All of these deserve the best possible preventive efforts, but 'best possible' will never mean perfect.
Therefore the next step is to avoid magnifying the terrorizing effects of a murderous attack, and instead to do what we can to keep it in perspective. Parents send their children to school every day, even though we know that some day there will be 'another Columbine' (or 'another Virginia Tech' or, away from the schoolyard, 'another Tucson'). School shootings are absolute evil, which we should take far more urgently than we do. But when they occur, the usual response is to try to dampen rather than intensify a reaction of generalized fearfulness and panic. That is how we should react to something called 'terrorism' as well.
*An earlier version referred incorrectly to the "Anglo-Prussian War."
E*Trade, oft-rumored takeover bait for TD Ameritrade, has made a stamp on U.S. culture with its long-running baby-mascot TV spots. The idea is that even babes can master the complexities of investing with E*Trade's help. And you wonder, as the folks at CollegeHumor.com did, if maybe it was babes who loaded up on all those subprimes, CDOs, derivatives and other toxic waste...
H/T: EB contributor P.J. Dempsey.
Some observations on the latest QS World University Rankings, now in their seventh year:
1. You can be sure of two things, that such rankings are popular with news-media editors and readers, and that they are severely limited in usefulness. Most rankings of things are. Who was the better lyricist, Harold Arlen, Dorothy Fields or Johnny Mercer? Does the Eiffel Tower trump the Taj Mahal? Does the Night Watch outrank Michelangelo's David?
University of Cambridge, first-ranked among 300 universities surveyed in the latest QS World University Rankings. Annual undergrad tuition is a relatively modest $14,000. (Reuters)
University rankings don't examine the illuminating, charismatic impact of selected faculty and the deadwood that overpopulates faculty lounges at some of even the best schools and departments. Neither do they assess value for money. How how do you even measure average post-higher education career and life fulfillment, never mind calculating fulfillment-for-money ratio?
Only the tangible is measured. Number of books in the library is a favorite. But what kind of books and other media, which could include all first editions of Ian Fleming's oeuvre, or the oldest known copy of Diderot's Encyclopedia, or everything of relevance that has been published on astrophysics, shorn of duplicative and superficial works assembled by librarians motivated by usefulness of learning materials and not sheer volume. The number of academic papers by faculty is a must in calculating ratings. But here again, is that a consequence of "publish or perish" or are the accumulated works indicative of truly leading-edge scholars? George W. Bush is the first MBA president (Harvard, no less) and also among the least competent U.S. chief executives. The tipping point on what school to attend occasionally is the provision of co-ed dorms.
2. Money only roughly co-relates with the claimed standing of the 300 schools ranked here. The average undergrad tuition of the 13 U.S. schools in the top 20 worldwide, according to QS, is $36,769. (I've chosen the low end of the range, which for 8th-ranked University of Chicago is $42,000 to $44,000.) The average score of those schools, by QS's methodology, is 94.2.
You have to ask yourself if it's worth the money to pay $40,000 a year to attend 19th-ranked Duke University in Durham, N.C., with its score of 89.3, or just $4,000 to attend the 17th-ranked McGill University, with its score of 89.6. Or to attend one of the top U.S. schools when the five highest-ranked British schools, with average tuition of $11,600, boast an average score of 96.0 to the American schools' 94.2.
Public or private? Private Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh charges a nosebleed $40,000 a year in undergrad tuition, and ranks 43th among the world's best schools, with a score of 78.5. The public University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, charges just $10,000 in tuition but ranks 14th with a score of 91.3. (AP, Getty Images)
You have to ask yourself whether the cachet of a private school like 43rd-ranked Carnegie Mellon is better value at $42,000 a year (score: 78.5) than the public, 14th-ranked University of Michigan (score: 91.3) at $10,000 a year. If you're a Swiss national, you can attend the 18th-ranked Swiss Federal Institute of Technology for just $1,000 a year. (Score: 89.5)
3. The "anglosphere" rules in the top ranks of the world's best schools, at least by the lights of this survey. Eighteen of the top 20 schools are American or British, leaving one each in Canada (McGill) and Switzerland. On the face of it, I refuse to believe not one German, French, or Japanese school belongs in the top 20. Conversely the relative anonymity of Johns Hopkins University and Caltech, the latter once having commanded much attention for the work of its faculty and graduates but long ago overshadowed by Stanford and MIT, suggests their presence in the top 20 is a function of legacy rather than current quality.
4. As in medicine, one sees here America's staggering divide between elite and everyday education. Defenders of the status quo in U.S. education and healthcare routinely cite that country's top schools and teaching, treatment and research hospitals as the best in the world. Fair enough. Except that you have to break the bank to attend or be attended at them. And the spread in scores between the costly U.S. schools and the likes of 23-ranked University of Toronto (tuition, $10,000; score: 86.2) doesn't justify, to me at least, the huge gap in tuition. And the high ranking of America's best schools and health-care facilties is made a mockery of by the low world ranking of the American adult workforce in math (35), literacy (18) and science (29) and the nation's comparatively poor health outcomes. A quick look at the latest QS ranking powerfully suggests the U.S. is already "out-educating" other nations, as Barack Obama has set as a goal, when that's plainly, and tragically, not the case.
William Moloney, former Colorado Education Commissioner, got to the nub of this crisis in a January speech:
Left unchecked on its current trajectory American education will be cited by future historians as a central cause in the decline of American Civilization...The Centennial Brief reported U.S. international ranking as 18th in Reading, 29th in Science, and 35th in Math. Updated results released just last month and given extraordinary coverage across the country confirmed this grim assessment. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan called the results a 'massive wake-up call' and further stated that ''America cannot tolerate falling ever further behind our international competitors'. [Yet] the many studies of comparative international education spending all reach the same conclusion: The U.S.A. is at or near the top in spending.
Scary when political journos don't have their facts straight. Here's one cited in a Sunday Star compilation of opinions on an NDP/Liberal merger:
Kady O’Malley, CBC, on Twitter: “Seriously, when the two most high-profile advocates of a Liberal/NDP merger are Denis Coderre and Pat Martin, well . . . that’s that.”
Actually, Jean Chretien is a bigger booster of a merger than either of the folks mentioned by O'Malley, and a rather high-profile advocate after winning three consecutive majorities. Bob Rae also mused about merger from May 2 until becoming interim leader, at which point such musings (at least publicly) were inappropriate for someone in that post.
David Olive is a business and current affairs columnist at the Star, which he joined in 2001 after stints at the Globe and Mail, National Post and Financial Post.
"If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion."
- George Bernard Shaw
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